Girish Kulkarni was born in his native place Belagavi in a Kannada-speaking family and grew up in Marathi-speaking Pune. He completed his bachelor's degree in electrical and electronics engineering from VNIT Nagpur, his master's degree in physics from TIFR Mumbai, and his doctorate in physics from IIT Kanpur. During his PhD, he worked in the group of Anand Jha on developing experimental and theoretical tools for characterizing the correlations of high-dimensional entangled quantum states produced from spontaneous parametric down-conversion. Subsequently, he joined the group of Robert Boyd as a postdoc and explored the effect of increasing interaction strength on those photon correlations. Recently, he joined the faculty at IIT Ropar, where he will teach physics and lead a research program in experimental and theoretical quantum optics. In his spare time, he loves reading books, listening to music, watching films, cooking, and biking around the beautiful villages of Punjab.